The term "unreliable narrator" is thrown around as frequently and casually as terms like plot and tone in discussions of contemporary literature, so it may come as a surprise that it's a relatively new term. It was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 work, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth applies the term to several works in Henry James's oeuvre and analyzes the progression of James's experiments with different types of first-person narrators. James is credited as a major figure in the transition into modernism, and Booth, writing around the height of literary postmodernism, states in The Rhetoric of Fiction that "with the repudiation of omniscient narration, and in the face of inherent limitations in dramatized reliable narrators, it is hardly surprising that modern authors have experimented with unreliable narrators whose characteristics change in the course of the works they narrate" (156–157).
Booth defines unreliable narrators in The Rhetoric of Fiction as narrators "whose values, on one or more axes, or whose pictures of the facts of the narrative explicitly depart from those of the implied author as teller" (431). In 1981, literary scholar William Riggan attempted to create explicit categories for unreliable narrators in his book, Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-person Narrator. The archetypes Riggan lays out in his work tend to possess either a malicious or irreverent inten— but an intent, nonetheless—to deliberately mislead the reader, or they ascribe a naivety to the narrator that could be characterized as a shortcoming, for instance, a lack of experience or intelligence.
Since Riggan's publication in 1981, literature has continued to defy categorization, and questions of narratorial and authorial "reliability" and "authenticity" have become far more nuanced than half a dozen categories could possibly cover. One work, which is not necessarily "experimental," but which nonetheless cannot be categorized in terms of Riggan's analysis of unreliable narrators, is Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons. Salamanca Tree Hiddle narrates the entire story and frame-story, both of which are riddled with references to her mother—both of which, really, revolve around her mother—without once acknowledging that her mother has died. Sal takes the reader on a trip to "visit" her mother in Lewiston, Idaho and can only finally share with the reader that her mother is no longer alive after she arrives at the cemetery where she's buried.
The "unreliability" of Sal is not a result of her being a child, a naïf, a madman, or a clown; her failure to disclose this major piece of information—information which is, after all, quite vital to the way the reader interprets the text and, once the information is disclosed, necessarily forces the reader to reevaluate and recontextualize much of the novel—plays a huge part in the novel's thematic framework. In other words, it's essential that Sal omit her mother's death, because the book is, after all, about her finally coming to terms with the fact that her mother isn't coming back. The reason why she feels it's so urgent to arrive in Lewiston by her mother's birthday is because she really believes that if there's any day she could conceivable bring her mother back, it would be on her birthday. Sal admits, "it was only then, when I saw the stone and her name—Chanhassen 'Sugar' Pickford Hiddle—and the engraving of the tree, that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back" (268).
If Creech's goal was to truly limit the reader's access to these stories to Sal's perspective, then the omission of her mother's death is a vital strategy to invite the reader into Sal's pure denial. Of course, Sal is privy to the facts of her mother's death, but she is unwilling to accept it as a reality. Since we, the readers, are not Sal, the best Creech can do is emulate denial by literally denying us the knowledge that Sal refuses to acknowledge. In the process, in the assumption that Chanhassen is still alive, the reader learns about her and comes to "know" her through Sal's eyes. When the reader experiences the finality of her death for the first time in the cemetery at the end of the book, their experience coincides with Sal's acceptance of Chanhassen's death, an acceptance any reader would no doubt have granted immediately, had her death been made explicit by any of the other characters in the book. With Sal's uniquely grief-informed unreliability, Creech builds a house of cards with a surprising amount of integrity.
